Re: Broken dream of mine :(

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 8:14 PM, William Leslie
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 2009/10/6 Jonathan S. Shapiro <address@hidden>:
> > Trivial example 1: The "readonly" keyword in C# is (correctly and
> > necessarily) ignored by most C# compilers. Exercise for the reader:
> > explain why.
> Any discussion of optimisation needs to keep in mind the premise that
> optimisations are only applicable if they preserve the semantics of
> the language.  Any attempt to take advantage of readonly would need to
> show that, on the domain of interest, no paths modify the region of
> interest, and that there are no memory barriers; effect analysis of
> this depth is very expensive if all you are getting out of it is to
> show that a readonly is a loop invariant...

Ahh. You are forgetting that both the Java and the C# runtime
environments have preemptive concurrency. In many interesting cases,
the analysis you want simply cannot be done unless you prohibit
runtime class loading.

> , indeed, if you are doing
> that kind of analysis, readonly is redundant.

You misunderstand what readonly does. It allows you to state, for
example, that a class member field is unchanging. In that situation,
it is not at all redundant.

> > Yes. They eliminate between 50% and 60% of current vulnerabilities.
> >
> > But be careful. You need to test and calibrate the runtime cost of this...

I am reminded of a humorous comment that Jochen Liedtke once made:
"Fast, yah! But correct? Eh."

> > JIT code is bad because we don't know how to assure anything as
> > complex as a JIT compiler.
>
> Any transformation a JIT compiler makes must preserve the semantics of
> the original program, otherwise it would not be useful.

That's a fine statement on paper. And like I said, it is
*considerably* beyond the current state of the art to know whether a
given JIT compiler actually meets this requirement.

>  Since the
> program must have been shown to be safe to have been compiled the
> first time...

How do you know that this check was actually performed?



shap